'FLASH'ING BACK: With a "Flashdancers" ad rolling past atop another cab, the now tame Eliot Spitzer chats with Time magazine about his life and the "tear in the fabric" of his marriage.Gillian Laub for TIME

Eliot Spitzer says buying sex from hookers was less of a “violation” of his marriage than a love affair with an “emotional component” would have been.

Spitzer made the remark in a recent Time magazine interview for a piece that doesn’t delve into the current crisis roiling Albany.

Asked about the perception that wife Silda — who insisted on therapy for both of them — has forgiven him, Spitzer replied:

“I don’t know if you can ever mend something like this, in the sense of repair the canvas so that you never see the tear in the fabric. I’m incredibly lucky to be with a woman who is willing to deal with that tear in the fabric and keep moving forward.”

Asked why not just have an affair, instead of going to hookers, Spitzer said, “I know this is parsing it very thin, but the emotional component would have in some ways been a worse violation.”

As to future political plans, Spitzer, 50, acknowledged the effect a campaign would have on his healing family.

“You have to understand what my family would go through,” he said. “It would be unbearable. I just couldn’t do that to them. It would be day after day of the ugly stuff.”

He was reflective, saying he’s come to “appreciate who matters and what and why.”

“You also lose a bit of the edge that leads you to tilt at windmills,” he said. “Maybe you might call that ambition. Silda used to say, ‘Being right isn’t the only thing.’ ” I would get so caught up in the ambition of proving to the world we’re right. You can destroy yourself that way.”

On theories that he was the victim of a plot, he said, “There are very powerful people who would probably do a lot to bring me down. Does it change the reality of what I did? No.”

He said he relates to people who feel betrayed by his hypocrisy.

“How do you think I feel?” he said, eyes misting. “At one point, I stood for something that was important and useful.

“I was in a place in time where I had a purpose, where it mattered. And then I destroyed it.”